Alabama

The 22nd state

Alabama was part of the Mississippi Territory until 1817, when Congress split off its eastern half as the Alabama Territory. Settlers were arriving fast, drawn by cheap land and cotton, and within two years the territory had enough people to ask for statehood. Delegates met in Huntsville in July 1819 to write a constitution, and on December 14, 1819, Alabama became the 22nd state.

The name comes from the Alabama people, a Native American nation of the region whose name was also given to the Alabama River. French colonists recorded them as the “Alibamons.” The most widely accepted reading traces the word to a Choctaw expression about clearing or gathering plants, usually translated as “vegetation gatherers.”

Five capitals in thirty years

Few states moved their government as often. The territorial government sat at St. Stephens, on the Tombigbee River. Huntsville served as a temporary capital while the first legislature met. Cahaba, a new town at the meeting of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers, became the first permanent capital in 1820, but floods and complaints about disease drove the government out in 1826, and Cahaba was a ghost town by 1900. Tuscaloosa held the capital for twenty years. In 1846, as settlement spread east, the legislature moved to Montgomery, where it has stayed. The capital page tells the whole story.

The Capitol in Montgomery has seen two turning points of American history. A six-pointed star on its portico marks where Jefferson Davis took the oath as president of the Confederacy in 1861, and in 1965 the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights ended at its steps.

Yellowhammers and the Heart of Dixie

Alabama has never adopted an official nickname, but two have stuck. “The Yellowhammer State” dates from the Civil War, when the dyed homespun uniforms of some Alabama soldiers reminded people of the yellow-and-brown yellowhammer, a kind of woodpecker. The legislature made the yellowhammer the state bird in 1927. “The Heart of Dixie” became so popular that a 1951 law required it, along with a red heart, on every Alabama license plate.

The state motto is Latin: Audemus jura nostra defendere, “We dare maintain our rights.” It appears on the coat of arms adopted in 1939. The shield carries the flags of Spain, France, Great Britain and the Confederacy, which all governed Alabama at some point, joined by the shield of the United States.

A seal with a map

Most state seals show people, animals or a landscape. Alabama’s shows a map. The design goes back to the territorial governor William Wyatt Bibb in 1817: an outline of the state with its main rivers. During Reconstruction an eagle replaced it, but the map returned in 1939 and is still in use. Under state law, using an image of the Great Seal for any commercial purpose is a felony.

Symbols from whales to cookies

Alabama has more than 40 official symbols, and the list keeps growing. The flag, a crimson cross on white, dates from 1895. The yellowhammer is the state bird and the camellia the state flower. The state fossil is Basilosaurus, an ancient whale that could reach about 60 feet long, and the law forbids anyone to take one of its fossils out of Alabama without the governor’s written permission. More recent additions include the Lane cake, a whiskey-laced layer cake from Clayton that turns up in To Kill a Mockingbird, the sweet potato and the Yellowhammer Cookie, made with the state nut and the state legume. See all of them on the Alabama symbols page.

Land and people

Alabama covers 52,420 square miles, 30th among the states, and had about 5.19 million residents in 2025, 24th in population. It borders Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi, and reaches the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile Bay. Huntsville, home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has grown into the largest city, ahead of Mobile, Birmingham and Montgomery, which are all close to 200,000 people.